The Secret DJ on taking his parents to a festival and his mum loving deep house

You know those festivals where girls waft about wearing culturally suspect bindis and Native American headdresses and every other converted van sells beards-in-a-bun; where 45-year-old men who work in an office all year become DJs for a day, thousands of them, all at once? Yeah, this wasn’t one of those festivals at all. This was more the one where every arena plays the same deep ’ouse tracks until they synchronise in an all-conquering sine wave, kids destroy everything like a plague of locusts and everything smells of burnt plastic as people who barely qualify for the sapient part of ‘homo sapiens’ attempt fire for the first and last time.

With me was ‘A House Legend’. It was a good day, because for once I wasn’t the oldest person in a 10-mile radius. It was him. He’d never played a large festival before. He called me prior to it and asked me what he should wear. I told him to expect knee-high mud. He talked about the good weather report and I had to patiently explain that hundreds of thousands of people, like cattle, can churn up fairly dry ground into a morass in a matter of hours – indeed, in minutes if there is even a tiny bit of rain.

It rained. He arrived in day-glo-bright, preppy golf wear (“it’s outdoors, innit!”), a pair of bright pink box-fresh Hunter wellies and a see-through cape. I watched his face as it registered first disgust, then a kind of Victorian stage-shock, then cringing terror at what unfolded before him. As we got deeper into it (in both senses of the word) the ground turned into treacle, then soup, then liquid, and he became a sort of overdressed Bambi, legs shooting out from him in different directions as he flailed to stay upright.

I had just received permission to carry him, when suddenly, neither of us were the oldest people there – because my mum and dad had arrived. Up until that day, neither of them had ever seen what I do. They were vaguely proud of me because they’d seen me on telly once, but they had no contact at all with my world – which was best for all concerned. There was no getting away from it now, though, as the festival was about five miles from their house and they’d spent all week proudly pointing out my name on the posters to their neighbours in the village. Now, my mum is a cancer survivor, about twice as old as the House Legend. She steamed past us straight to the bar while I held him in my arms like a baby. She is from the countryside.

Next time I saw her I was on stage and she was at the front among all the 19-year-old kids, pissed out of her head on my rider and shouting random epithets like “That’s my son! He’s a DJ!” and “Have you ever had cancer?” My dad, meanwhile, was standing next to me on stage, the grand onion in the custard. Every now and then I’d look over to him and give him an enquiring thumbs-up. He’d reply by taking his fingers out of his ears as fast as a gunslinger, replying with a thumbs-up of his own and then whipping them back in his listening-holes as fast as I’ve ever seen him move.

So there I was, performing in front of thousands, my mum moshing at the front, my dad standing next to me on stage with his fingers in his ears while a certified House Legend pissed himself laughing at me, in front of everyone, for the next two hours. It was almost as bad as the time I was playing the Space Terrace in the morning while the resident stood waiting for me to finish, inches away from me, just out of bed, yawning prodigiously, eating an egg sandwich and reading The Sun. Maybe this look was worse. Hard to say.

When we finally got far enough away from the noise for my dad to be able to hear, the House Legend asked him what he thought of it all – being new to festivals and that.

My dad thought hard for a while before he spoke, something no-one does any more.

“Well… it’s a bit like World War One.”

“Eh?”

“Lots of noise, petrified underage kids covered in mud that all need sending home, and…

“And what?”

“…I think I’ve got trench foot.”

“I love deep house!” shouted my mum.